TheBookPolice wrote:But--I might have guaranteed success by having updated my 3GS to iOS5 before getting the 4S.

The first thing my Verizon salesguy asked me was "Is your 3GS OS up to date?" When I said it wasn't, he told me to update it first, then to a Restore from Backup on the 4S. Did as instructed, and it all went off without a hitch.

My 3GS was on iOS5. I have heard from numerous people that they did not have the same issue I did. That makes me feel somewhat better, as at least now I know it wasn't a glaring bug that made it through quality control.

Petro wrote:4GS convinced me to make the jump from Android. I'm done with custom roms and hacks. I'm happy to have a phone that just works without me needing to track posts on xda.

No offense, but maybe it was the custom roms and hacks that were fucking up your phone. What was the reason for rooting the thing in the first place? Because you could?

I ask because about the only thing that annoys me about my phone are the stock apps I can't uninstall. But despite what some say, they don't cause me headaches or suck a lot of battery life just by sitting there. I'm the sort of guy who'll gladly dick around with a LINUX distribution, but like you, I just want my phone to work ... which is precisely why I never bothered to hack my os.

Just got the iPhone 4S, which is my very first smart phone. I'm apparently old enough that I haven't done much w/ it in the first 48 hours, but maybe this weekend I will harness it's full power and become digitally invincible.

Where my nerds at? - anyone mess around with the amp model apps? Any good ones?

Mean Scenester wrote:No offense, but maybe it was the custom roms and hacks that were fucking up your phone. What was the reason for rooting the thing in the first place? Because you could?

Actually, you're absolutely right. I'd never go so far as to say that my phone was actually "fucked up", but I'm willing to say that every issue that I had was quite probably due to my use of a custom rom.

I didn't hold those issues against the OS on their own, though. I'm rather tech savvy and I always had the tools at hand to find the problem and take care of it - my issue was that I just got tired of having to do that. (I might've mentioned upthread - the best resources for android hacking also have a notoriously low signal to noise ratio.)

I bought an Android phone because the base OS (after 2.2 dropped) did almost enough and performed almost well enough to make me happy. Customization crossed that gulf, but on a single-core snapdragon with limited (and generally volunteer) optimization and a weak GPU, it still wasn't universally fantastic. And for whatever reason, all the sense-based roms just seemed to get slower with age. The learning curve wasn't terrible, but even once you'd settled on a flavor of rom there was always new radios or kernels. Beyond that, there's just so many android handsets that the really talented rom chefs were always jumping onto the newest/fastest handset (often paid for by fans) and support for aging equipment just sorta stalled. So, even if you liked a rom, development would often stagnate.

I eventually settled on the Cyanogen Mod roms, as they were the fastest and most sparse, while at the same time seeming to be the most actively developed. They kept me happy for awhile longer, but I'd honestly just lost interest in tinkering. (And tinkering was a large part of the draw to begin with.)

Probably the biggest influence for me was buying an iPad2 over the summer. Even on 4.3, the thing was just slick, smooth and ridiculously polished. All interaction was lag-free. The gyro for orientation detection very seldom flipped (that might just be a size difference thing), and the app ecosytem (especially for music apps) was much richer. I loved the silly thing.

The combo of almost identical hardware (minus screen) + a phone + a camera that's about on par with my aging point and shoot kicked it over in my favor.

I don't hate Android and I'm not saying that I've ruled them out, but (as of a week in) this 4S is the best, slickest, smoothest and most polished phone I've ever owned. The vast majority of my investment in iPad apps being directly compatible and already purchased didn't hurt, either.

I really don't have any iron-clad allegiance to either side. I'll flip in a heartbeat if my own informed opinion makes me think it'll make me happy. As of now, I don't feel that I've made a mistake.

I will say though - man, there's a lot of people that really hate Apple stuff. My own friends included. (The more nerdly, the more opposed, in many cases.) It's been interesting.

Mean Scenester wrote:Generally speaking, I like Apple stuff from the standpoint of personal use. It's the system admin in me that hates them more with each subsequent release (referring to OS X here; not iOS).

Hah. I can't blame you there in the slightest.

Apple's seemingly never taken the notion of central management too seriously with OS X. Heck, I can't even keep an SMB connection open over the weekend without having to force-quit finder on Monday.

Don't get me started on ADS & LDAP integration. They're wonderful standalone machines but they're terrible in a Microsoft-centric enterprise unless they're allowed to run almost as standalone boxen.